


Behind Crumbling Walls

by NightsMistress



Category: Star Stealing Prince
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Burns, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Memory Alteration, Mid-Canon, low-key Erio/Astra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-14 09:12:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14766746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: On the way back from the Sepulcher, Astra, Erio and Snowe are separated from Hiante and Relenia by a broken bridge of all things. As the weather worsens, Astra, Erio and Snowe seek out shelter in a suspiciously well-hidden room in an abandoned village, treat their wounds, and try to work out what is happening around them.





	Behind Crumbling Walls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [straightforwardly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/straightforwardly/gifts).



> My thanks to my betas for all of their fantastic support ♥

Astra squinted against the wind and studied the horizon. Visibility was poor, and deteriorating by the minute, but anyone could see that the sky had darkened considerably in the last hour. Rather than the usual light grey of late afternoon, the sky was as dark as slate. The wind had picked up in the last half hour as the temperature dropped, cutting through Astra’s thick cloak with ease even as she hunched further into it. She couldn’t feel her feet as she sunk into another snow drift, forcing herself forward. It would be terrible to die here, so close to the shelter she had been told was not far away. She gritted her teeth against a blast of snow flung directly into her face, wiped her eyes clear, and kept walking forward. It was hard to overcome the growing desire to just stop and catch her breath for a moment, sit down in the snow, and rest.

It was not weather for travel, but they didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the storm to pass. Maybe it wasn’t going to blow over. Maybe this was the next step of Sabine freezing to death: a terrible storm that stole the lives of every person in the kingdom in one night. 

It had been that suggestion from Erio that had pushed Astra forward earlier in the day when they had been separated from Hiante and Relenia, Hiante urging them forward even as he and Relenia studied the bridge that had broken just as Relenia started to put her weight onto it. The Sepulcher had left a great scar on the ground when it fell, and bridges and buildings that were safe to cross before had been rattled to their very foundations by the impact. After the good luck of Erio’s sister saving them from certain death, it seemed strangely unfair that they were separated by something as mundane as a broken bridge.

At least they would catch up again soon. Erio had been talking with Hiante, and Hiante and Relenia had a plan to skirt around the worst of the damage and catch up with them at Sabine Caves. Astra couldn’t picture the route that Hiante and Relenia would have to take, but those two were much better at thinking in the cold than Astra. Right now, all Astra could think of was the need to find shelter to wait out the worst of the weather.

Their progress had slowed to a crawl, with each step a tremendous effort. Astra had initially hoped to wait for Hiante and Relenia at the Sabine Caves, pushing on to Sabine under the relative shelter of the caves, and deliver the bad news in one day. On the map in Relenia’s house, her idea had seemed feasible. Now she was just looking for somewhere to Now she just hoped to find somewhere out of the storm to recover her strength.

Their surroundings were not very promising. They appeared to be in a long-abandoned town, buildings worn down over the passage of time to free-standing walls and broken pillars. There were no signs of the people who had lived there, or what had happened to them. There was a story here, if Astra had the wit and will to seek it. Right now, she didn’t.

A dark, blocky shape in the distance caught her eye and she turned to face it properly, wincing against the cut of the wind and snow. For a wild, desperate moment she thought it might be the castle of Sabine. The memory of the warmth and light of the town of Sabine was a lovely thought, even as she knew that it was impossible. They had not crossed Sabine Caves, and the castle was a hard walk even in normal conditions. She screwed her eyes closed, reminding herself that they had played tricks on her all afternoon.

When she opened them again there was a thin layer of snow resting on her shoulders. Fear twisted her stomach into knots as she brushed it away with a numb hand. She looked again, and wanted the shadow to be shelter.

Erio might be able to see better. He always spotted things that Astra missed.

“Hey, Erio!” she yelled, turning to where she last saw him. He was by her side, as always, and was turning to face her. She grabbed his shoulder and turned him in the direction of the shadow. “What’s that? Can you see?”

“Not really!” Erio yelled back. “We need better light!” He looked expectantly at Astra, but it took her a moment to understand.

“Right, got it!”

She called a lightning spark to her fingertips, holding her hand palm out as if to repel the chill of the storm. Her fingers tingled unpleasantly as the lightning leapt from fingertip to fingertip in a series of short arcs, but the radiant heat started to warm her entire forearm. She breathed through the pain of sensation returning to her fingers, and focused on controlling the corona of energy as it wreathed her fingers. As it sparked across the sky, illuminating the weathered ruins of the town, Astra could finally make out the shadow, and was sure it was a town hall by its size in comparison to the houses they had passed. Better yet, it appeared more intact than the rest of the town. It would not be comfortable, but at this point any shelter from the storm was better than nothing.

“That’s got to be shelter!” she yelled. Her words were drowned out by a howl of wind that cut through her winter cloak with sadistic glee. Astra had never thought that weather could want for anything, but she knew differently now. This weather wanted her, and everyone else living in Sabine, dead by its doing.

Erio’s shoulders were hunched against the chill, his smile a thin knife of triumph over the folds of his scarf. He had said earlier that he didn’t feel the cold as keenly as she did, but even he flinched as a particularly frigid blast of air cut through the broken stone that surrounded them. She returned the grin, pleased that they had finally scored a win despite the odds stacked against them.

Then she remembered that it wasn’t just the two of them with Hiante out of sight but not out of Erio’s mind. Snowe was with them too. She remembered him saying what felt like an eternity ago that there was shelter around, shivering so much that she thought he would bite his tongue, but she didn’t remember seeing him recently. She had been so focused on her own physical misery that she hadn’t been checking on Snowe’s progress as often as she should.

“Where’s Snowe?” she asked, looking around wildly. She couldn’t see anything but stone and snow, with Erio a dark shadow to her side. 

Erio sighed wearily, pointing over his shoulder to a direction somewhere behind him and to the right. “He’s just there.”

Astra turned her gaze to where Erio was pointing and focused. She was able to make out a bobbing, flickering light that, after a moment of thought she was able to understand was Snowe’s witchlight. Once she realized that, she was able to see and recognize the red of Snowe’s cloak and then Snowe himself. His head was down as he stumbled forward, as if he needed to see where each foot would land, and his progress was painfully slow. It was frightening how long it took for Astra to understand that she was looking at Snowe rather than a mildly curious feature of the landscape, and that fright gave her the burst of energy she needed to turn around and start making her way back to Snowe.

Snowe had stopped by the time she had reached him, a layer of snow covering his shoulders and bowed head that he did nothing to dislodge. He did not react to her presence, or when she grabbed at his wrist to pull him forward. Her fingers, clumsy and stiff, slid down his forearm and bit into the burns that encircled his wrist. She could feel blisters burst under her fingers, and she let go with a sympathetic wince.

“Sorry!” she said quickly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Snowe didn’t react to that either.

“Snowe?” Astra reached out and brushed the snow off his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t say anything as he walked towards a nearby broken wall, leaving Astra staring at him with her hand up to where his shoulder had been. She shook her head and forced herself on, one leg at a time, to Snowe’s side.

“It’s not far now,” Astra said urgently, pulling on Snowe’s elbow to get him to move. She turned and pointed at their destination. “See, the town hall’s up there. Or we think it’s a town hall. Anyway, it’s going to be warmer than here! Let’s go, Snowe.”

“There’s shelter here,” he said as he shook off her hand. The hairs on the back of Astra’s neck stood up as she realized that he wasn’t shivering, and he hadn’t stuttered. She froze in place, hand resting on the pommel of her sword, as Snowe removed the glove from his left hand in an easy gesture. His fingertips glowed dully as he held his hand against the wall, and as Astra watched a rough patch of wall disappeared. It looked like a room was behind the wall, but that didn’t seem to make sense. Astra craned her head over a break in the wall to confirm her suspicions. Snow was banking up on the other side of the wall, higher than the snow on the side in front of her. It didn’t make sense, so it had to be magic.

She turned back to Snowe to ask him how he had known to find shelter there, only to take a step backwards as he finally looked up at her. He had looked ghastly all day, but now his expression was blank and empty, his eyes unseeing. His drawn face and shadowed eyes made him look more like the corpse of his mother than a living person, especially as he stared at her with his mother’s eyes. Astra swallowed, her mouth dry. She could sense Erio by her elbow, but neither of them moved.

Astra and Snowe stared at one another, Snowe blank and expressionless, Astra breathing shallowly, until Snowe blinked and started to shiver again. He looked at her and then down at his bare hand with a troubled, lost expression before shoving his glove back on. His fingers were clumsy and he flinched as the glove scraped the burns on his wrist. Astra took some comfort in that.

Erio managed to find his voice first, his words sharp with fear. “How did you even find that?”

Snowe took a shuddering breath as he looked at each of them, his eyes wide and wild like a spooked animal’s. When he spoke, his voice was very small and uncertain.

“I - I must have been told about it once.”

Astra had never thought she’d be so relieved to hear Snowe stutter.

“You don’t know?” Erio pressed, leaning closer. His knives were still in their sheathes, but his body was coiled and tense in preparation of striking. Snowe stared at him, the fire hovering above his shoulder flickering in time with his ragged breathing. 

“I don’t … I can’t…”

Astra didn’t think that Snowe was lying. He looked genuinely frightened, gaze flitting between Erio and the open room as if he couldn’t decide which one was more of an immediate threat. Astra could understand the fear of the room as she didn’t know of any magic that allowed someone to create a room that took up no space at all, especially in a long-abandoned village. She didn’t know how Snowe had known it was there. She didn’t know why Snowe was staring at it with a haunted expression.

She did, however, understand that if they didn’t get into shelter soon, there wouldn’t be an opportunity for anyone to understand what was going on.

“It doesn’t matter,” Astra said quickly, and Snowe jumped at the sound of her voice. “What matters is that we have somewhere to stay until morning. Don’t you agree, Erio?”

Erio looked like he did not agree. In fact, he was looking at Astra as if she had betrayed him and he was taking it extremely personally. 

“Yeah,” he said with poor grace. “It’s more important that we don’t freeze to death.”

“So let’s get out of the weather!” Astra announced. She ignored Erio’s strangled protest that he should have gone in first and stepped into the empty space, holding her breath as she crossed the threshold. She let it go as she stepped inside a windowless room, with walls and floor made of the same stone of the castle, only to sneeze as her footstep disturbed a layer of dust that carpeted the floor.

The warmth was like a blow. It wasn’t that the room was warm, as the ashes in the fireplace were long cold, but that she was out of the wind. She started to shiver more, and wrapped her arms around herself to try and speed up the process of thawing. 

“It’s safe,” she announced, though she wasn’t sure if that was true. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that it was immediately safe. The thin layer of dust on every flat surface and the relatively fresh linens on the single bed in the corner furthest from the door suggested that the room had been used recently. Astra reminded herself that even if the Original King had survived the fall from the Sepulcher, he would not be in a state to try and kill them tonight.

“Don’t do that again,” Erio grouched. “What would have happened if you’d died? Next time let me go first.”

“I’m fine!” Astra retorted. “You two should come in. It’s much warmer in here, and it’ll be even better after I make the fire.”

“You’re not making the fire,” Erio said flatly. “Not after last time.”

Astra ignored Erio and started picking through the firewood. The wood was dry without being brittle, furthering her suspicions that they were trespassing on a room that someone else cared about and frequently used. 

“What happened last time?” Snowe asked. He stepped inside the room, arms folded around his chest. He looked around, a puzzled frown knitting his brows, before saying slowly, “Is it just me, or is this place pretty clean?”

“She blew up the fireplace.” Erio stepped inside and the wall closed up behind him. Astra had become so used to hearing the storm that its absence was deafening. She brought her hands up to her chest, flexing her fingers to limber them up. Creating a lightning bolt strong enough to start a fire but small enough to not destroy the fireplace would take some precision. Astra felt confident that this time she would be able to cast a lightning bolt of the right intensity.

While Astra warmed her fingers up, she watched as Erio tapped the walls with the back of one of his knives. The knife bounced off each wall with a dull thud, and Erio nodded in understanding. “It’s all real. I wonder how they did it.” He looked exhausted, but his eyes gleamed, his imagination alight. It was moments like these that Astra loved the most about Erio; when he relaxed enough to be curious about the world rather than wary.

Snowe, on the other hand, just looked disturbed. “I’m not sure we can stay here,” he said. “I think this is someone’s home.”

“You were the one who found it,” Erio pointed out, which had the effect of making Snowe look more alarmed. “Besides, we don’t have a lot of options. We can’t go back out into the storm.”

“Well, no…” Snowe didn’t sound convinced. 

“Anyway,” Astra said brightly. She waggled her fingers rapidly, pleased at the ease of movement. “I think I’m ready to try this,” she said as she started to stack the firewood she had selected, pleased with herself at how naturally building a fire was coming to her now. She pushed herself back onto her feet to admire her handiwork.

“You’re definitely going to blow up the fireplace,” Erio remarked, and Astra poked her tongue out at him.

“Ready, everyone!”

“Uh … I think I’ll do it this time,” Snowe said quickly. He brought his hands up, fingertips pressed together and fire building in the space left between his hands. He scowled in concentration and fire shot out to the fireplace in a soft arc. The kindling ignited with a pop, but the larger logs did not immediately catch alight. Instead, the fire grew as Astra watched. She put her hands up to warm them, delighting in how wonderful the warmth was against cold skin.

She took a moment to stand in front of the fire, snow melting and dripping onto the floor, and just watch the flickering flames. They had been on the road since early morning, and Astra had slept poorly the previous night. As the fire started to warm the room, Astra realized that she was exhausted. She sighed, and with that exhale all the tension ran out of her. She sat down in front of the fire, legs drawn up to her chest and cloak around her like a shell. Her eyes closed and she let her thoughts drift, uncaring of the heavy, uncomfortable weight of her knapsack on her shoulders.

She felt someone sitting down nearby, and opened her eyes to see Snowe beside her, shoulders sagging and head drooping forward, shivering despite being so close to the fire. She looked up for Erio and found him leaning against the wall, arms folded defensively.

“I don’t think anything’s going to attack us here,” Astra said, turning back to the fire. “They’d have to find it first.”

“Except the owner, whoever that is.” Erio’s dark tone suggested that he had had the same thought that Astra had: this room was likely owned by the Original King and he was not going to be happy that they used it. Of course, he was also not going to be happy that Snowe had caused him to fall several hundred feet to the ground, and Astra considered using a room of his paled in comparison to that. 

“They’re not going to find us tonight,” Astra said firmly. “Let’s deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”

“Yeah, we have enough to deal with now.” Erio stared pointedly at Snowe. “Like your wrists.”

Snowe’s head snapped up. “T-th-they’re fine,” he managed.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Erio said. “I saw them, remember?”

Astra was aware of Snowe’s burns, because he had told her about them. She hadn’t studied them in any detail, as she had relied on Snowe’s self-assessment. Rather than dwell on the issue, she opened her knapsack. Her blanket rested at the top, its soft fleece resistant to all water. Queen Lina had made sure of that. 

She breathed around the pain that thought caused her; she hadn’t liked Queen Lina but she also hadn’t wanted Queen Lina or King Edgar dead, and now she would never know why the queen had spelled the blankets of a girl who was never to leave her tower. It was an off-kilter kindness that was more painful than simple cruelty might have been, and she would never understand why Queen Lina had done it.

Something to deal with later. She pulled the blanket out of her bag and started to collect her healing items for an inventory. The tinctures clinked together as she removed them from her bag, but she was relieved to see that each vial was intact. She swirled two potent tinctures and looked across at Snowe.

“Let’s take a look at them at least,” Astra said. She gestured to the bottles she had lined up. “I have a whole lot of tinctures right here we can use.”

She thought that Snowe was about to protest. Instead, after taking a breath to steel himself, he nodded once and turned sideways to face Astra. He held still as Astra carefully pulled his sleeves away from his wrists, first the cloak and then the tunic underneath. This close, she could feel his shudders and pained breathing, see his jaw clenching, but he said nothing and did not pull away. The most sound he made was a pained hiss as she finally exposed the burn on his right wrist to the cold air. Blisters and horribly red swelling bracketed his wrist, with the worst of it concentrated within two fingers-width of the base of his hand. 

She swallowed as she lifted his arm by the elbow to study the other side, swallowing bile as she saw that it was consistent. The burn looked painful, but also curious as it wasn’t consistent with what she would have expected a lightning strike to look like. Burns from lightning strikes usually had an entry and exit point, and this one was very centred around his wrist. Then again, she was no healer. Perhaps this was what happened when you were hit by a strong enough lightning bolt.

“That had to hurt,” she sighed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It honestly didn’t hurt that bad,” Snowe offered weakly. He tried to smile. It didn’t help.

“Hold still,” Astra said, using her grip on his elbow to keep his arm steady. She uncorked one tincture with her other hand and started to carefully pour the liquid over Snowe’s wrist. Snowe gasped and his arm jerked back, but Astra’s grip was strong enough that he couldn’t pull away completely. She could feel him shake and felt awful for it, but as they watched the blisters started to shrink and the swelling subside. She poured another tincture over the burns, ignoring Snowe’s protests about wastefulness, and the burns healed further. There would need to be specialist treatment once they returned to Sabine Castle, but her efforts here would mean that Snowe would continue to have the use of his hands until then.

She did the same with his other wrist, wincing in apology at the burst blisters from her indelicate fingers. The burns on this wrist looked much worse than on the other wrist, twice as large and weeping clear fluid. This one required three tinctures before the raw skin healed. The burns were also oddly centred. The more that Astra looked at the burns it looked like something had been strapped around his wrists, but in looking at Snowe’s set face Astra could see that she would get no answers on that front tonight. Instead, she let his arm rest in her hand for a moment, using it as a barometer for Snowe’s pain. His shudders eased, and Snowe closed his eyes in relief.

“There was only so much I could do,” Erio said, inclining his head towards Snowe’s wrists. “He’s had far too much healing from me already.”

Astra looked at Snowe in alarm, grip tightening around Snowe’s elbow. It hadn’t been that long ago since Erio had dragged Snowe’s body to the tower, announcing to her and Hiante that Lorel had almost killed some idiot. She had thought that Snowe’s dizzy spells and shivering were due to blood loss and exhaustion. She had forgotten, or had chosen not to notice, how close Snowe had come to dying. He should be dead. He wasn’t, and the only answer Astra could come up with as to why was the demon inside him.

What were the signs of over-exposure to demon magic? Queen Lina and King Edgar had always smelled of old blood and decay, poorly masked by rose or pine needles, and they never seemed to notice. Astra used to have to steel herself to submit to Queen Lina braiding her hair, as the stench lingered in her mouth every time she swallowed. Snowe smelled like blood, dirt, and sweat, and sometimes she could smell the space that fire left as it burned air away. On the other hand, King Edgar had said a few days ago that Snowe had smelled of death. She brought his arm up to her nose to sniff it, but all she could smell was the sharp cleanness of the tinctures as they dried on his skin.

Snowe looked at her with some confusion but didn’t pull his arm away.

“Sorry,” Astra said, adjusting her grip to better maintain control over Snowe’s arm.

“For what?”

“This,” she said, and prodded Snowe’s wrist. Snowe flinched, sucking in a breath between his teeth, but Astra kept testing. She remembered that Queen Lina’s arm had dimpled under the pressure of Astra’s hands once, when Astra was young, and Queen Lina’s arm stayed that way for an hour. Snowe’s flesh was warmer than she expected, still sticky from the tinctures she had poured over his wrist, but it felt as responsive as her own skin. 

“It feels okay, at least,” Astra said, letting go of Snowe’s hand. Snowe pulled his arm close to his chest, cradling it with his other hand. “Did you heal it too, Snowe?”

Snowe shook his head. “No. I can’t heal burns with my magic.”

That made sense. It would be strange to heal burns with more fire.

“Now that your hands aren’t going to fall off,” Erio said, “what is _wrong_ with you?”

“Uh - what?” Snowe spluttered. He looked across at Astra, and then back at Erio. “W-what are you talking about?”

“It’s how we got here,” Astra said. “There’s no sign from the outside that this was even here. Have you been here before?”

Snowe shook his head. “Never.”

“Are you sure?” Astra pressed. “Maybe someone took you here when you were little. Your mom and dad, maybe?”

Erio scoffed. “Come on, Astra. You think the King and Queen took him anywhere?”

Astra wasn’t sure they could dismiss the prospect so casually. Astra had forgotten that she had known Snowe when they were young, and her childhood was like a dream until she started living in her tower with Hiante and later Erio. She knew that from speaking with Snowe, his memories of his childhood were even more vague. It was entirely possible that the King and Queen had taken Snowe to a place like this and done something, and then Snowe had forgotten about it in much the same way that Astra had forgotten about eleven years of her life.

“Do you remember who did tell you?” she asked.

“N-no.” Snowe’s shivers made his stutter more pronounced. “I just - I just knew about it.”

Astra chewed on her thumbnail and considered what to say next. It had been a terrible few days and she didn’t want to say something that she’d regret the minute it came out of her mouth.

“Is that why you stared at Astra like that?” Erio interrupted her thoughts.

Snowe stared at him. “What are you --” He swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What do you remember about finding this place?” Astra asked.

“Not a lot,” Snowe said, to Astra’s surprise. “It felt like I was dreaming. Things don’t make sense in dreams but you accept it. I guess I woke up and there it was. And you were staring at me.” His gaze darted between Astra and Erio before looking down at the floor. “I’m sorry, that’s all I remember.”

“That’s all that really happened,” Astra said. She rested her hand on Snowe’s knee. “You just looked … strange, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Snowe said. “I see.” His voice was colorless, his expression bleak.

“It really looked like you were asleep on your feet,” Astra said, trying to reassure Snowe.

“I guess that’s it,” Snowe said. His smile was pallid and unconvincing. “Sorry for worrying you guys. I’m fine now.”

It wasn’t fine. Nothing about what had happened over the last few days was fine. Astra smiled at Snowe anyway.

The silence stretched out uncomfortably.

“You guys hungry?” Astra proposed finally, mostly to hear her own voice. “We should probably eat something.”

“Yeah, we should.” Erio was quick to agree.

Hiante had insisted that Astra and Erio carry dried food with them in case they got separated, knowing that neither of them could cook well enough to make something more substantial. Astra had kept hers in a pocket on the side of her knapsack and pulled it out - a mass of dried meat, smoked by Hiante a few weeks earlier. It had started to defrost from its proximity to the fire, making it easier to separate now.

She handed Erio and Snowe portions of jerky and started chewing on her own. The meat was cold and stiff, but became more flexible as she sucked on it first. She swallowed and the salty taste steadied her, made her feel more like herself. Finally, the meat softened enough that she could chew on it. The events of the last few hours seemed far more manageable now. 

She looked across at Erio, who now had some color in his face. His gaze was abstracted but body language was tense, as if he was listening to something far away. Astra waited until he finished before asking, “How’s Hiante?”

Snowe looked up from his contemplation of the fire at this.

“Warmer than us,” Erio said. He grimaced and rolled his eyes, presumably in response to something he was sensing from Hiante. “He’s worried about us.”

“Tell him we’re fine!” Astra urged, wishing for not the first time that she could talk to Hiante the same way that Erio could. 

“I did!” Erio said indignantly. “He said that made him worry more about us!”

“Can all demons talk inside people’s heads?” Snowe interrupted.

“Some of them,” Erio said slowly. He looked at Snowe, his expression neutral. “Can yours?”

“Uh …” Snowe looked down at the ground. “I don’t … I don’t think so.”

Snowe really was a terrible liar.

“That’s not a good sign if it is.” Erio’s worry was obvious to Astra by the way he fidgeted with the hem of his scarf. “You need to sleep more. It’s probably because you’re weak that you can hear it now.”

Snowe scowled, presumably about being called weak, but didn’t protest Erio’s assessment.

“Have you always had trouble sleeping?” Astra asked.

“No. Just recently.” Snowe shrugged. “I guess it’s the stress.”

Astra wasn’t so sure. They were all under a lot of stress, but she thought that it was more likely that Snowe was avoiding the obvious answer. At this point, Snowe’s nightmares were something that they all knew about and carefully pretended not to, and his evasiveness about whether his demon was talking to him nagged at Astra. She didn’t know what it all meant, but thought that it was a mystery that needed solving. She was beginning to think that _everything_ was connected somehow in a knotty mess of questions, and she only needed to find the right question to ask to unravel it all.

There was too much that Astra didn’t know, and that had to change. 

“When we get to Sabine, we’ll do some research on demons as well,” Astra decided, raising her chin to accept the challenge she had imposed on herself. “Your parents lived at Sabine as well as in the Sepulcher, maybe they left something there that we can use.”

“Or the library,” Snowe said. “But we need to find out what we can do to restore the link first.”

“We can do both,” Erio said. “They’re probably related, you know.”

“You think so too?” Astra asked.

“It makes sense.”

“All right, so tomorrow we’ll meet up with Hiante and Relenia at the Caves, we’ll get back to Sabine, and we’ll start researching it. We’ll find an answer.”

Snowe didn’t look convinced. “Maybe.”

“We will,” Astra said. “There’s all kinds of stuff that we don’t know yet. The link was made there, so there has to be a way to remake it.”

“Yeah,” Snowe said heavily. “I guess.” He didn’t sound all that persuaded. He just sounded as tired and worn as Astra felt. 

Astra smiled brighter to balance it out.

“For now, we should rest. It’s going to be a big day tomorrow.”

“You want to use the bed?” Erio wanted to know, nodding at the bed in the furthest corner of the room.

“No,” Astra said. She was cold and tired and more than a little scared, and that made her suggest, “Let’s share blankets tonight.”

“What?” Erio blurted.

“Oh,” Snowe said, startled into giggles for reasons that Astra didn’t quite understand. “Erio can sleep between me and Astra.”

“Of course I will,” Erio said sharply. “I’m her bodyguard.”

“He’s very good at it,” Astra assured Snowe. She wasn’t really sure why she was justifying Erio sleeping next to her, and whether the justification was really for Snowe’s sake or Erio’s. Perhaps it was for her own. She just wanted him there, close to her, while she was asleep. She felt safer with him with her.

Snowe said nothing, but Astra could see his half-smile as he wordlessly took his blanket out from his pack and spread it across the floor, in front of the fire. 

She looked up at Erio, and then away. He was blushing, which was a rare sight, but she didn’t want to tease him about it this time. She had read enough books to recognize what a crush looked like, and she was fairly sure that Erio had a crush on her. He had always been protective of her, but the embarrassed, self-conscious edge to it was new.

She didn’t need to have read books to recognize that she had a crush on him. It was more than the connection between her and him that made him seem like a part of her. She liked the way that his smile was fleeting and a little surprised, as if he was a little startled by it too. He was a kind person, and she liked that he wasn’t afraid to show that side of him to her. If it had been just her and him in this room, with a storm raging outside and a steady fire inside, she might have taken his hand. She might have done more, said more. But now wasn’t the time for that.

Instead, she removed her own shoes and placed them to one side, laid her blanket on top of Snowe’s, and crawled between the two layers of blankets. She could feel Snowe do the same on the other, keeping his distance from the centre where Erio was to go. Erio grumbled and finally crawled in as well.

It was a close fit, and Astra was very self-conscious about the placement of her arms and legs, trying to be solicitous of Erio’s space while also wanting to ensure that she was as much inside the blankets as possible. She finally found a configuration that worked: curled on her side with her arms folded towards her chest like she was holding something precious between her hands. Erio’s sharp angles fit in the spaces that she left behind like a jagged jigsaw puzzle. It was a little embarrassing having him so close to her, but it also eased a knot of worry inside her chest. She thought about taking Erio’s hand in hers, but shied away from that. This was enough.

Besides, from the the wriggling on the other side of the blanket, it seemed that Erio and Snowe were not fitting together as neatly or as easily as she and Erio had. Astra wondered if she should tell them that they would fit together better if they stopped trying to keep some distance between them, but decided to leave them to their own devices. They were both people who would make up their minds in their own time, and Astra had learned with Erio that she got better results if she gave him time and space to do that.

The blankets stopped moving because of Snowe and Erio’s wriggling. Silence fell. The space between the blankets warmed quickly with their body heat, and finally, finally Astra felt comfortable and warm. She could hear the hitch of Snowe’s breathing as he stumbled from consciousness to nightmare and Erio’s weary sigh as he slipped into sleep, and she closed her eyes. She willed herself to think of nothing, and to let tomorrow’s troubles be dealt with tomorrow.

Everything was not fine. But it would be.

**Author's Note:**

> And then four hours later, Snowe woke them up by jerking awake with a start, but you can't have everything, right?


End file.
